Business solutions applications provide a large number of powerful tools addressing many aspects of businesses and other organizations. A majority of such applications provide integrated capabilities for financial management, distribution, manufacturing, project accounting, human resource management, field service management, business analytics, and comparable areas. An important aspect of these applications is providing automated business accounting functions.
To track and maintain financial information in an organization, financial professionals set up a chart of accounts, which is a collection of accounts that define a financial framework. To further track the transactions in these accounts, dimensions are added to the accounts. A dimension is essentially a variable that contains additional information associated with a transaction. The dimensions may be used to classify, report, and analyze financial transactions based on specific business needs. Dimensions may include department, cost center, profit center, region, purpose, and similar aspects of tracked transactions.
The relationship of the dimensions with the main accounts and with other dimensions, as well as how transactions can be entered against an account structure are controlled by rules, which may be set up by an administrator or users with varying permission levels. For example, a manager may define accounts and dimensions for his/her department. The configuration of the account and dimension combinations is typically spread across multiple aspects of applications. Thus, creation of valid account and dimension combinations using existing accounting tools may be a challenging task.